December 1, 2009

Kenny urges patience

“We have internal answers for every position, so I’m not overly stressed on anything. Wherever you are at the end of the Winter Meetings or in January or even when Spring Training starts, it doesn’t mean that will be the shape of your team for the rest of the season. All it means is where you are now. We are constantly trying to improve our club. You don’t have to have things in place from Day 1. Sure, I would like to, but we try not to do anything stupid that limits our ability to make a later move that is of greater impact. Right now, we are positioned as one of the best pitching clubs around. It’s huge for us going into the season not to react too quickly. If you do something out of panic right now and it inhibits your ability to do something of greater impact later, then you haven’t served anybody’s good. Remember, 162 games is a long time.”

Things (trades/signings) will pick up after next week’s Winter Meetings:

“Everything up until then is really just a game being played. It’s not that I’m not listening right now. I’ve just had too many years and too much lost sleep over wasted conversations meant solely for positioning. You learn to stake a step back, and people will let you know when they are serious.”

And Kenny needs more info on the revenues coming in:

“Well, probably the biggest roadblocks for us are revenues. It kind of has us in a holding pattern until more information comes in. This depends on probably how our fans, advertisers and sponsors feel about our chances and what happens as result of that. As we sit here right now, we will stay in a holding pattern. That’s not atypical of where we’ve been before. We just had to be creative to make things work. In our being creative, it sometimes makes people very uncomfortable. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”